The JFK Conspiracy Theory Which Makes the Most Sense & Why It Matters Today

One of my late mentors persuaded me of this one, which he laid out over three books - it's especially relevant in this age of Vladimir Putin's imperial wars and his spies' disinformation campaigns.

This post is the fourth in an ongoing series on antisemitic culture. See the first three installments here: What It Means When the Leader of the Republican Party Dines With THREE Antisemites and What Causes Someone to Be an Antisemite? and When & Why Conspiracy Theorists Sometimes Stumble Onto the Truth. These writings are part of my ongoing effort to overcome my PTSD by forcing myself to try to write and publish something every day commenting on and analyzing current cultural affairs and their impacts on politics, faith, and, well, everything. “Politics is downstream from culture,” the late Andrew Breitbart popularized among conservative bloggers while he was alive. I’d go a step further: Everything is downstream from culture. The cultures you embrace determine who you are and who you become. You become what you worship.

Yesterday, in my post discussing “conspiracy theory culture” and the possibility that the West-Fuentes-Yiannopoulos dinner with Donald Trump could have been an intentional set-up to damage his political career, I promised a summary of my favorite conspiracy theory, the version of the JFK assassination which I like best and which makes the most sense to me. I’ll also explain why this weird stuff matters today.

The best summary of the conspiracy theory is in the title above, 2021’s Operation Dragon: Inside the Kremlin’s Secret War on America by Ambassador R. James Woolsey and Lt. Gen. Ion Mihai Pacepa. Two titles which Pacepa alone wrote in the two previous decades also lay out the theory and the broader themes - 2007’s Programmed to Kill and 2013’s Disinformation:

Now, part of why I’m so sympathetic to this theory is because in 2013, when Disinformation was published, I was Pacepa’s editor in his role as a columnist at PJ Media. For years I tried to help Pacepa connect further with more readers, both in encouraging him to try a bloggier style and more contemporary themes, and also in embracing many of his ideas and promoting them to my friends and colleagues. Pacepa died in 2021 from Covid at the age of 92, just a few weeks before Operation Dragon was published. I’ll always be grateful to him for the kindness he showed me over the years, and will cherish the autographed copy of his memoir Red Horizons that he sent me.

What was so special and unique about Pacepa, which gave him a one-of-a-kind worldview? He was the highest-ranking defector from the Soviet bloc, and even at the time I was editing him, he still lived in hiding to protect himself from the assassins - such as Carlos the Jackal - who had been sent to kill him. He had been the former spymaster to Romania’s Communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, and was thus privy to higher levels of secrets than any other former Soviet officials who escaped to the West.

Eventually I figured out the big problem with Pacepa’s books and articles: a whole lot of his claims really can’t be verified with other sources. You just have to take his word for it - which I’m generally inclined to do, of course, but the Robert Anton Wilson-skeptic in me just can’t go all the way to really say, “YES! This is true and it’s how it all went down!”

So please do take the following with a few grains of salt.

The story of the JFK assassination tends to divide between two basic hypotheses: either Lee Harvey Oswald was a lone gunman acting on his own (the conventional, historically mainstream understanding) or there was some broader conspiracy with other individuals which he was a part of (the conspiracy theory culture understanding.) Conspiracists and researchers disagree wildly about just who the agents of this broader conspiracy might be and what their motives were. Usually the ones blamed are other Americans - the wealthy “establishment,” the mafia, right-wingers of some sort, or Kennedy’s successor LBJ. According to Pacepa, there’s a big reason why there have been so many conflicting conspiracy theories circulating for so long. But I’m getting ahead of myself. First: who does Pacepa blame for Kennedy’s death, and where does he fall on this seemingly polarizing question?

His answer is a tantalizing hybrid of both: there was both an international conspiracy to kill Kennedy AND Oswald chose to act on his own. How could this be?

Pacepa makes the case - and assembles a lot of evidence over the three books - that Oswald was trained and directed by the KGB’s Department 13, the top secret assassination division which took out hostile leaders and dissidents all over the globe through the 1950s and 1960s. So Oswald was sent by the Soviets - Nikita Khrushchev in particular - to assassinate JFK. But then what happened? The KGB’s assassination plans were exposed to the world and Oswald was never given the order to go through with his mission, since, in doing so, the Soviets would be blamed.

What did Oswald then do? Act on his own accord, and shoot Kennedy anyway, thinking foolishly that he would be welcomed back to the USSR as a hero. Instead, we all know what happened: he had to be eliminated - Jack Ruby - so the Soviets’ fingerprints on Kennedy’s death could be obscured.

Pacepa then explains what happened: “Operation Dragon” was the name of the Soviet plot to seed disinformation throughout the West over the course of decades to blame Americans for the KGB’s killing of Kennedy. This was a very common Soviet disinformation tactic at the time - to simply blame the CIA or other intelligence agencies for what they actually did.

Pacepa’s Disinformation book lays out how the Soviets did this on all sorts of targets, all around the world. It also claims that one of the primary tasks of the KGB was the manufacturing of disinformation at multiple levels, in many ways, for the purpose of confusing the enemy. This was an even more important goal than the conventional spy work of stealing secret information, according to Pacepa.

One of these disinformation campaigns Pacepa analyzes especially fascinated me in 2013, when I was in the middle of my career as a Counter-Jihad writer-activist: another of the conspiracy theories the KGB spread elsewhere around the globe was antisemitism in the Muslim world. Pacepa claimed that the KGB promoted “The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion” conspiracy in Islamic countries, translating it into Arabic. This is apparently one of the reasons why antisemitism is so high in Muslim countries today, and the “Protocols” can be purchased on the street.

What all this means today is probably obvious at this point in light of Vladimir Putin’s very well-publicized efforts to manipulate our American electoral processes. We need to understand how conspiracy theories are often the tools of intelligence agencies. It’s not just Russia that’s planted lies all around the world to obscure its wrongdoing - that’s just spy agencies broadly. Most states do this as a way to sabotage their enemies and protect themselves.

Photo by Hello I'm Nik on Unsplash

We also need to learn enough about the patterns and tactics of disinformation, so that we can recognize them and not fall for them ourselves. The purpose of disinformation isn’t necessarily to convince people of a lie, but rather to confuse them so much they don’t know where the truth starts and a lie begins.

So what do you think? Does this theory make sense to you? Or is there another version of the JFK assassination you find more compelling? Please leave your opinions in the comments.